It's a long story

In 1968, John Cunningham arrived in Derry to cover a series of civil rights marches. Yesterday - 33 years, over 3,000 deaths, and 11 Guardian correspondents later - Rosie Cowan reported that the IRA had begun to decommission. Here 10 of our Ireland correspondents recall how improbable this historic news once seemed

It all began with a new type of fixture on autumn Saturday afternoons: marches and sitdowns in wind-whipped Derry in October 1968. Blood and police batons quickly followed from those October skirmishes. Reporters had time for a decent lunch at the City Hotel, before scarfing up to cover proceedings which ran into extra time as night fell on the Bogside.

The context we identified for the first phase of the unrest was the civil rights movement then sweeping many cities and campuses; indeed the leadership in Northern Ireland were middle-class professionals like John Hume and Ivan Curry.

If there'd been a historian around of Roy Porter's academic allure, we'd have been quicker to spot the crabbed shadow of the IRA. Who could have thought that the violence would go on for three decades; or guessed the toll of grief to reach this week's news?

Harold Jackson, 1968-1972

My first experience of Northern Ireland was nearly my last. I arrived in October 1968, just after the Londonderry RUC had forced the province on to the national agenda by hosing down a group of protesting Westminster MPs.

In the previous weeks I had reported from Jerusalem, Seoul, Saigon and Prague so, as I left Aldergrove airport, I automatically drove on the right. It was stupid, obviously, but it neatly demonstrated a characteristic English ignorance of this distant part of the kingdom.

Discussions with Unionists soon made me realise that they expected to remain part of a Britain that had probably not existed since 1690, if then. The nationalist community inhabited an equally unreal world in which the Irish Republic's military forces would come streaming north to liberate them.

The failure of the IRA to mount any real resistance in those early days brought a universal Bogside jibe that its initials stood for "I ran away".

That failure, of course, rapidly brought the Provisionals and their weaponry out of the shadows. As the Provisionals' strength increased I got into trouble for noting, in 1972, that Downing Street's ineptitude had ensured a crisis lasting at least another generation. Even now, I suspect I was unduly optimistic.

Simon Hoggart, 1971-73

I first went to Northern Ireland in 1968 to cover the aftermath of the Derry civil rights march that started the present troubles. The civil rights movement used the tactics and the vocabulary of their American equivalent, though it soon became clear that this was a minor irrelevance to a much deeper conflict. (Many Bogsiders were horrified at the arrival of black soldiers the following year and hurled racist taunts - "We'll melt yer down for rubber bullets, yer black bastard" - before joining in another rousing chorus of We Shall Overcome.)

In January 1969, the People's Democracy march from Belfast to Derry, consisting mainly of students from Queen's University, met ferocious and violent Protestant opposition which seemed horrifying at the time, but stopped short of murder. The PD people were proud of be ing non-sectarian, though even then they admitted to being protected at nights by the remnants of the old IRA. I think at this point it became clear that the situation was insoluble. Both groups believed and believe their demands are self-evidently reasonable and that the other side is, consequentially, morally wrong. They are also prepared to kill for their demands. To them, compromise is pointless and defeatist, which is why the non-sectarian Alliance party gets between 5-11% of the poll. In Ulster, one in 10 is the moderate vote.

I don't believe that the IRA's de-commissioning gesture will have any serious long-term effect. Gerry Adams is a master of spin, quite as adept as Alastair Campbell. This is a response to September 11, and will be quietly ignored when the time is right. I remain deeply pessimistic. The people of Northern Ireland are prepared to do anything for peace except vote for it, and nothing will change until they do.

Derek Brown, 1973-1977

In my time, the idea that the IRA would voluntarily give up its guns, was simply unthinkable. It came into the same category as the Moscow Young Conservatives, or hell freezing over.

The Provisional IRA was in its murderous infancy. It had been formed in 1970 by hardliners exasperated by the failure of the old Official IRA, and its consequent failure to react to an alarming sequence of events: riots; the mobilisation of the hated B-Special auxiliary police force; the arrival of the British army, and the introduction of internment without trial in August 1971.

The next few years saw the bloodiest phase of the modern Troubles. More than 450 lives were lost in 1974 alone. It was, of course, a secret war and yet it was easy enough for reporters to make contact with the most deadly underground army in Europe.

I remember several briefing sessions with Martin McGuinness in the old Bogside gasworks in Derry. Given that he was commanding the Derry brigade at the time, he was also surprisingly visible on the streets during demonstrations and the daily riots which disfigured the city. He was an intense young man, with out any of the flamboyance or bombast of some of his Belfast counterparts. He was, however, proud that under his command, not a single civilian was accidentally killed by the IRA.

Gerry Adams I never properly met, though I remember seeing him in Sinn Fein's dingy little office on the Falls Road in Belfast. I was surprised when he was identified by a BBC television reporter as the IRA's new chief of staff. That may or may not have been true, but it certainly infuriated the republican movement. The BBC man left Northern Ireland within 24 hours.

Anne McHardy, 1977-1980

When I left Belfast in 1980, John Hume had been leader of the SDLP for a year, Gerry Adams was vice-president of Sinn Fein, David Trimble was in the political wilderness and influential loyalist paramilitaries now leading the small pro-Agreement parties essential to Trimble were inside the Maze prison. Belfast had a few dreary shops and no work for the Falls. Derry was bereft of facilities and work. Newry was dominated by its army barracks and Dundalk, across the border, was a haven for republican gunmen.

I did not know Trimble, but Adams and Hume I did. Adams, who put a concerned arm around my shoulders after the IRA bombed a train I was on, laughing off the irony, was scruffy in a tweed jacket. Hume, rumpled as ever in a dark suit. Both were already networked into the international political circles now delivering the peace process, Hume more so. The seeds of the policies that have achieved IRA decommissioning had germinated. Could they have flourished then? Without the fierce negotiation, without the maturing of loyalist paramilitaries into democratic politicians, without the economic and social revolutions that have put flourishing factories into Dundalk and Catholic apprentices into Belfast's docks? No.

Paul Johnson, 1984-1986.

It's just before midnight in Newry - sleeting rain and freezing cold. On one side of the road, behind a line of white tape is a small crowd. They are looking towards the huge grey-green fortified walls with their metal grilles and armed turrets of the local police station. The doors swing open allowing reporters closer in for a better look.

Two hours earlier the IRA fired nine mortars from the back of a converted lorry parked half a mile away. Four fell outside the station, destroying a couple of cars, two went off in midair, one failed to explode and one hit the gates taking off a layer of paint and little more. That left one. It hit a temporary hut inside the safe courtyard that was being used as a canteen. The shattered debris of what remains of the flimsy wooden building can now be seen. The bodies of nine police officers killed instantly - aged between 19 and 41 and including two women - are being taken away. From the midst of the crowd someone shouts: "Up the Provos." Two streets away, in a local hotel, the night porter pointing the way to the payphone has a grin on his face: "The boys got a result tonight."

The next day, Margaret Thatcher talked of "our brave armed forces", Neil Kinnock of the "full bestiality of the IRA". Ian Paisley demanded the reintroduction of the death sentence.

But even then, Gerry Adams took a longer and more sophisticated view. In a speech a little later at Miltown cemetery in Belfast at the side of the republican plot, he gave the ritual tribute to the IRA, describing it as "an unbeaten and unbeatable generation who are committed to finishing off the unfinished business of the Dublin rising, 1916". But, to fewer cheers, he also said: "The development of an open, popular and relevant political party is as important as the resistance of the IRA. We can have an irreversible and long-term effect." It's possible that he had plotted out in his mind the events that led to Tuesday's announcement from the IRA. But back in those grim days, no one else had.

David Hearst, 1986-1991

I was in a minority of one when I wrote that the republican movement had no alternative but to pursue a political path, and that the leadership of Gerry Adams represented the movement's only hope. It made me deeply unpopular with both the IRA and Sinn Fein, for whom participation in a "partitionist" assembly would have been anathema.

To argue that peace was around the corner during a period of time which encompassed weekly loyalist riots, the Remembrance Day bombing at Enniskillen, Loughgall, and Gibraltar, was indeed perverse. What I got hopelessly wrong was the time all this would take, and the amount of blood that would be shed in the process. But the political distance that a Unionist such as David Trimble has travelled has also been great. I can remember a Trimble with a darker shade of glasses, participating at ominous roadside gatherings to ensure loyalist compliance with protest action against the Anglo-Irish Agreement.

I remain grateful to Martin McGuinness - the Shepherd as he was known, for one incident. I was with Alan Rusbridger at Milltown cemetery observing the burial of the Gibraltar Three. Pop. Crackle. Bang. I remember thinking how inappropriate it was for kids to be setting off firecrackers at such a tragic occasion. They weren't firecrackers. They were grenades and they were being tossed at us by a lone loyalist, Michael Stone, who had got himself into the crowd of mourners. Having entirely the wrong reaction to gunfire, I stood up and it was McGuinness who placed an avuncular hand on my shoulders and kept my head down. It's been down, ever since.

Owen Bowcott, 1991-1994

When I arrived in Belfast in 1991, the Troubles were locked in a recurring pattern of sectarian slayings, pleas from the bereaved for no reprisals and abortive inter-party talks. It seemed so repetitive, several newspapers withdrew their correspondents.

At the end of a desultory tramp through County Tyrone's damp lanes for the funeral of a Provisional volunteer, the republican oratory was vintage "no surrender". "No matter how often they cut us down, others will pick up and follow on," promised a Sinn Fein councillor. The coffin was draped with the Irish tricoleur and an IRA beret. Adams stood in reverent silence.

One afternoon in October 1993, in the windowless back room of Sinn Fein's publicity office on the Lower Falls Road, Adams gave an interview about his talks with the SDLP leader John Hume. He was in an unfamiliar ferment of excitement, talking of "taking a step on to a slippery slope". He quoted a poem, if memory is correct, by Walt Whitman:

"O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;

The ship has weather'd every rack, the prize we sought is won"

He almost clambered on top of the desk. At the time, amid a string of sectarian killings, such optimism seemed at odds with the surrounding paramilitary bloodletting.

John Mullin, 1997-2000

I only started focusing on decommissioning on the afternoon of the Good Friday Agreement, when Jeffrey Donaldson walked out of Stormont just before it was sealed, in protest at the accord's failure to resolve the arms issue. It was clear there were no guarantees, and that Tony Blair, in his letter of cover that day to David Trimble and then in his pledges of fudge during the referendum campaign, was seeking to convince Unionist waverers there was a deal when there was none.

I believe Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness did accept that decommissioning in some form might have to come, and they would have to get themselves into a position where they could deliver. But they were intent on keeping the options open for as long as possible, partly to persuade the republican constituency, and also in the hope that it might prove unnecessary.

The three arrests in Colombia, and, particularly, the September 11 atrocities in the United States, transformed the climate, and persuaded Adams and McGuinness that they could push forward, for it was clear by then that Trimble was never going to let the issue drop. While credit must go to Adams and McGuinness, Trimble has scored a remarkable coup, and hardline Unionists' relatively muted response in the immediate aftermath of the IRA statement underlined that.

Rosie Cowan 2000-

When I joined the Guardian last December, the idea of the IRA permanently destroying any of its weapons in the near future still seemed firmly in the realm of fantasy.

As the year wore on, with its usual quota of crises, the Westminster general election which left Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble battered and bruised by hardline opponents, his resignation as Stormont first minister, and security chiefs blaming the IRA for one of the most violent nights of rioting the province has ever seen, things did not bode well.

There was always a feeling the Provisionals might do something more to boost Sinn Fein's meteoric political rise nearer to the Irish Republic's general election next year, but even the most optimistic commentators thought it would be some kind of fudge and we would still be writing endless stories about the dreaded D-word years from now.

But later that summer, the mood music began to change, at first, ever so subtly, but then two things changed those rumblings that something might, just might, be on the cards, into a roar.

The first was the arrest of three IRA suspects in Colombia, which turned the already cooling breeze from the US administration toward Sinn Fein into an icy wind. The second was the September 11 attacks, and the revelation that anyone associated with an armed terrorist group would feel a global backlash like never before.

Even after these past few weeks, when journalists have been working themselves into a frenzy of expectation, it is still hard to believe the seismic shift we were so often promised has actually happened. Of course, there will still be plenty of problems: whether the Provisionals intend to continue decommissioning, loyalist violence, policing, unionist dissent. This is Northern Ireland, after all. But for once, the earth really did move.

· David Beresford, Simon Winchester and David Sharrock could not contribute to this feature.